Positioning technologies have been developed to provide various services such as navigation, traffic information, a rescue request, a crime report response, a location based customer relationship management, and the like. A global positioning system (GPS) is typically used as the positioning technologies.
It is required to locate user equipment, such as a mobile terminal or the like, in order to use the location based service. However, the location based service, which uses the GPS satellites, cannot provide location information of the user equipment at regions that GPS satellite signals are weak (e.g., such as indoor environments, tunnels, underground parking places, downtown areas and the like).
To cope with the drawback of the GPS based positioning system, indoor positioning solutions, such as Wi-Fi based solutions, cellular based solutions and the like, have been recently introduced. However, a Wi-Fi based positioning system requires at least three Wi-Fi access points for allowing triangulation to estimate a location of the user equipment. Thus, the Wi-Fi based positioning system relies on access to Wi-Fi access points, so that it may not be available in certain locations.
Many cellular based solutions, such as Cell of Origin, Time of Arrival (TOA), Angle of Arrival (AOA) and the like, are employed to provide the location based services. However, the cell of origin based positioning system may provide poor accuracy because it depends on a cell size. Also, the TOA based positioning system and the AOA based position system may lead to privacy concerns because the calculation for estimating the location of the user equipment is performed in the mobile network system. Further, these cellular based position systems have mainly two drawbacks in that accuracy is poor and at least three signals from different base stations are required for trilateration or triangulation.